A Microfluidic Cancer-on-Chip Platform Predicts Drug Response Using Organotypic Tumor Slice Culture.

Optimal treatment of cancer requires diagnostic methods to facilitate therapy choice and prevent ineffective treatments. Direct assessment of therapy response in viable tumor specimens could fill this diagnostic gap. Therefore, we designed a microfluidic platform for assessment of patient treatment response using tumor tissue slices under precisely controlled growth conditions. The optimized Cancer-on-Chip (CoC) platform maintained viability and sustained proliferation of breast and prostate tumor slices for 7 days. No major changes in tissue morphology or gene expression patterns were observed within this time frame, suggesting that the CoC system provides a reliable and effective way to probe intrinsic chemotherapeutic sensitivity of tumors. The customized CoC platform accurately predicted cisplatin and apalutamide treatment response in breast and prostate tumor xenograft models, respectively. The culture period for breast cancer could be extended up to 14 days without major changes in tissue morphology and viability. These culture characteristics enable assessment of treatment outcomes and open possibilities for detailed mechanistic studies. SIGNIFICANCE: The Cancer-on-Chip platform with a 6-well plate design incorporating silicon-based microfluidics can enable optimal patient-specific treatment strategies through parallel culture of multiple tumor slices and diagnostic assays using primary tumor material.

Metal and Polymeric Strain Gauges for Si-Based, Monolithically Fabricated Organs-on-Chips.

Organ-on-chip (OOC) is becoming the alternative tool to conventional in vitro screening. Heart-on-chip devices including microstructures for mechanical and electrical stimulation have been demonstrated to be advantageous to study structural organization and maturation of heart cells. This paper presents the development of metal and polymeric strain gauges for in situ monitoring of mechanical strain in the Cytostretch platform for heart-on-chip application. Specifically, the optimization of the fabrication process of metal titanium (Ti) strain gauges and the investigation on an alternative material to improve the robustness and performance of the devices are presented. The transduction behavior and functionality of the devices are successfully proven using a custom-made set-up. The devices showed resistance changes for the pressure range (0-3 kPa) used to stretch the membranes on which heart cells can be cultured. Relative resistance changes of approximately 0.008% and 1.2% for titanium and polymeric strain gauges are respectively reported for membrane deformations up to 5%. The results demonstrate that both conventional IC metals and polymeric materials can be implemented for sensing mechanical strain using robust microfabricated organ-on-chip devices.

Advances in the Electronics for Cyclic Voltammetry: the Case of Gas Detection by Using Microfabricated Electrodes.

This paper presents an advanced voltammetric system to be used as electronic tongue for liquid and gas analysis. It has been designed to be more flexible and accurate with respect to other existing and similar systems. It features improved electronics and additional operative conditions. Among others these include the possibility to optically excite the solution and to treat the output signal by a differentiation process in order to better evidence the existence of small details in the response curve. Finally by the same type of tongue preliminary results are shown dealing with O2 and CO2 concentration measurements in appropriate solutions.